How To Track Your Direct Mail Campaigns

How To Track Your Direct Mail Campaigns

The Importance of Tracking

Tracking your direct mail is essential for your real estate business. If you aren’t tracking the results, it is costing you thousands of thousands of dollars. For instance, let’s say you do a six drop mailing campaign of 1,000 per drop. Let’s say drop #1 didn’t get any response but drop #4 you received a 3% response and closed 3 deals. Now, two things could have happened. 1) It is possible that your mail piece on drop 4 could have been the better piece or 2) the people you mailed to just responded better seeing your message the 4th time. Many investors tell me their best responses come from the 4th or 5th drop.

The question is, should you trash mail piece #1 and never use it again? Maybe, maybe not. You might want to try it for another campaign. Typically, your lowest response comes on the first mailing. If that is the case, could it be that the response was low due to the mail piece  or because it was the first piece in the campaign? You can test it by changing the sequence in which the person receives it. If it doesn’t perform very well at that point, then it might be time to trash it. Without tracking, you will never know this information and you could be wasting money on an under performing mail piece without ever knowing it.

To sum this section up, track the message of your mail piece along with what order in your campaign it went out. A great mail piece being sent out first may or may not get as good of a response rate as a lesser mail piece being sent out on the 4th, 5th or 6th drop. Once you have enough data and you know your numbers, you can tweak your mail pieces to increase your response rate. Keep the winners and tweak them to see if you can improve them.

Know Your Numbers

Knowing your numbers and tracking your results will give you information on how much marketing dollars you need to spend in order to get a deal. If you don’t know this, you don’t have a sustainable business. Without knowing your numbers, your marketing campaign will be much like playing the Slot Machine… If I put this much money into marketing, I hope to get this amount back. Much like a playing a slot machine you are uncertain about the outcome and that’s not a good place to be.

Tracking Your Direct Mail Campaign

Now you know the importance of why you should be tracking your campaign. In this section I’ll give you some strategies as how to track your campaigns. It’s easy to tack your campaign if you only do 1 mail drop per list. You simply look up the person’s name (hopefully in a CRM or Excel) to see what list they are in. But what if you are mailing the same list multiple times? How do you track which mail piece got what response?

1.Use a Unique Phone Number

In my opinion, this is the best technique. You will have to buy multiple phone numbers but you can get them fairly cheaply. I’ll use an example for a 6 mail drop campaign to demonstrate this: Each drop requires their unique number. You would need 6 different phone numbers. Just make sure you assign each mail drop their own unique number and you record that info in your CRM.

2.Use a code

Another effective way to track is to put a unique code on the post card. Make it short and simple. When someone calls just ask them for that code. By doing this, you will know what postcard in the campaign they are responding to.

3.Send them to a landing page

If you decide to put a website on your mail piece, some investors recommend it and others don’t. The investors who don’t recommend it says their response rate decreases with a website. This is something you should be testing. If you decide to put a website on your mail piece, give each mail piece their own unique URL that directs them to your landing page.

Well, there you have it. Hopefully, this blog has been informative and you will start incorporating some of these methods in your direct mail campaign.